The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part IV

by David Marcum

  “I have had to deal with many murderers in my time, Watson,” said he, “but none of them have repelled me quite as much as that woman. In the coolness and assured demeanour of Lady Sophia Galsworthy, I see only the wickedness of the very devil himself.”

  “The woman is stoic, no doubt, but she has suffered a great shock.”

  He shook his fist in the air. “Watson, is it possible that you are as naïve as you sound? Do you not see a curious coincidence at play? We have heard of two deaths, both of wealthy men. In each case, the wife is the same woman and, in each case, she stands to inherit a significant sum of money. Mark my words, Doctor. Old Collins was mistaken in his belief that he saw old Wargrave returned from the dead, of that I am certain, because I have no doubt that Wargrave is dead - and that his wife was responsible. Our enquiry has now become something more than the pretty problem of this morning, for it becomes a question of proving a clever woman guilty of two murders.”

  “But Galsworthy was a heavily set man, Holmes. That woman could not have overpowered him.”

  Holmes dismissed my objection with a wave of his hand. “A woman can stab a man in the back as easily as anybody else, Watson, and a man is less likely to be afraid of turning his back in the company of his own wife than he is in the presence of an enemy.”

  “But you said yourself that Wargrave’s death was suicide,” I insisted.

  “That was a judgment made in advance of the facts, for which I reproach myself entirely. Collins’ supposed phenomenon was merely the prelude to a much darker affair. Come, Watson, we must set ourselves very seriously to solving the murder of Theodore Wargrave.”

  We spent a busy afternoon making various enquiries. Holmes demonstrated that keen energy which I have observed before when he was upon a trail, but it seemed intensified by this personal determination which he had summoned within himself to prove Lady Sophia to be a murderess. Our initial investigations were to the archives of Scotland Yard, where Holmes was a familiar presence. We were shown into the dark, dank corridors of the lower echelons of the criminal investigation headquarters, where the walls were lined with seemingly endless rows of the records of previous cases. The constable in charge had no difficulty in obtaining the Wargrave file, and he handed it to my companion with a furrowed brow. It was clear he could see no cause for the famous criminologist’s interest in the file.

  Holmes found a small table in the corner of the room and opened the file on his knees. I leaned over him in the dim light afforded by a single lamp on the desk beside us. After a few moments of flicking through the pages, Holmes handed me the medical examiner’s report.

  “Does anything strike you as important in there, Watson?”

  I scanned the contents. “Wargrave was not in the best of health. He was below average weight at the time of his death and his teeth showed some signs of deterioration. I suspect he must have been a heavy drinker, too, judging by the state of his liver. Otherwise, the report confirms the facts as we know them. Death was the result of a single bullet wound to the right temple, powder blackening on the skin around the wound indicating a close range shot.”

  Holmes took the report from me and replaced it in the file. “I had hoped to find some clue, Watson. Some small piece of evidence which might have been overlooked at the time of Wargrave’s death which would suggest the guilt of his wife.”

  With his eyes fixed on the file in front of him, he assumed that abstracted expression which I have come to associate with the supreme manifestation of his extraordinary gifts. So evident was his growing excitement that I dared not speak. At last, with a sudden release of suppressed energy, he sprang from his chair with the pressing need for action.

  “Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot! We must hurry if we are not to allow a devious murderer to evade justice.”

  We stopped at a telegraph office where Holmes dispatched a hastily worded telegram. I could not see the details of it, but I could tell from the haste with which he wrote the words that it was of supreme importance. Next, we hailed a cab and Holmes gave Merchant Road as his desired destination.

  Daylight was failing as we turned into the long road which stretched through the heart of Whitechapel. The maze of streets running from it were narrow alleys of sin and decay, the air hanging heavy with the stench of poverty and deprivation. The decaying husks of human beings, in various stages of drunkenness, tottered around the filthy cobbles of those dark avenues, and the closeness of the tenements which surrounded us gave the impression of the whole area closing in and swallowing us. Shadowy figures of children hung out from the open doors of the lodging houses, their hands outstretched in fraught pleas for food or shillings. It was hard to believe amid that mire of insufficiency and desperation that the thriving heart of opulent and wealthy London beat strongly a few scant miles behind us.

  We knocked on the door of number 38 and our summons was answered by a rough looking character with a scar down the right-hand side of his crimson face. The sight of a sovereign in Holmes’s hand was enough to guarantee his co-operation, and he confided that he had had no new tenants since the arrival of a certain Mr. Chappell. A second sovereign ensured our entrance and the landlord’s consent to wait for Mr. Chappell in his room. We made our way up the narrow, wooden staircase, which at any moment threatened to give way beneath our feet. Suspicious eyes glared at us from cracks in the various doorways as we passed. At last, we reached the door of Mr. Chappell’s room and Holmes gave a brief knock, before throwing the door open.

  The room was deserted. It was a meagre space, furnished in the most rudimentary fashion, with a small table on one corner and an old wooden chair beside it. A bed was placed in the centre, but it consisted only of an old mattress and a soiled, discoloured sheet for a blanket. The curtains were little more than sheets of old lace, torn in places and moth-eaten in others. The whole place smelled of damp, and I could not help but think that it was misfortune indeed for a man to be forced to dwell in such conditions.

  “We must possess our souls in patience, Watson,” said Holmes.

  “What is the meaning of all this?”

  “Greed, Watson. Undeniable, unpalatable, unrelenting avarice resulting in the death of two entirely innocent men.”

  Before he could elucidate further, the door was flung open in a gesture of rage. Into the room, there stepped a tall and strongly built man with closely cropped hair and the dark eyes of a scheming villain. His skin was pale, which contrasted with the depth of those circles of hate which glared at us. His teeth snarled at us from behind his cruel, thin lips and his voice came out in a harsh, guttural whisper.

  “What the devil is going on here?”

  “Mr. Chappell, I believe,” said Holmes.

  “That wastrel landlord downstairs said I had men intruding into my privacy. Who are you? What business do you have here?”

  Sherlock Holmes remained at the window, where he had positioned himself. He looked out through those miserable lace curtains into the street below. “Perhaps we had better wait for the person whom I have summoned here.”

  “Who are you?” repeated the demon in the doorway.

  Holmes offered no reply. In the silence which fell between us, we heard the hurried footsteps on those old stairs. Within seconds, standing behind the apparition who had burst in on us, there stood Lady Sophia Galsworthy.

  Never before have I seen a woman’s expression change from anxious panic to abject hatred as quickly as her face did that night. Upon seeing Sherlock Holmes, her eyes turned to fire and her mouth let out a shrill shriek of betrayal.

  Holmes walked to the centre of the room. “Close that door, madam. We shall have the privacy which Mr. Chappell so desires.”

  She obeyed my friend’s authoritative tone. She closed the door and when she turned back to face Holmes, she threw a piece of paper at his feet. “You sent that telegram to me, coaxing me here to
trap me.”

  Holmes picked up the slip of paper and handed it to me. The message was clear and concise: THE CHARADE IS EXPOSED. COME TO MERCHANT ROAD AT ONCE.

  “It was no trap, madam. If you were innocent, it would have meant nothing to you. Only this man’s accomplice could possibly have construed any message of importance from those words.”

  Chappell stepped forward so that his face was only inches from my companion’s. In response, I moved from my position and I was beside Holmes’s side in an instant. Chappell’s eyes were on me but I held his gaze, although I tightened the grip on my cane so that I was prepared.

  “There is much to explain,” said Sherlock Holmes. “It might be as well for me to give my version of the extraordinary events which have brought us together in this room, and you can elaborate or correct me as you see fit.

  “From the moment I learned that Sir Benjamin Galsworthy had been murdered, I suspected that Lady Sophia was somehow involved. It is the foolish detective who does not recognize that coincidence is possible, but the detective who fails to recognize a pattern in a series of events is an even greater fool. I could not avoid the obvious connection between the death of Theodore Wargrave and the murder of Sir Benjamin. That Lady Sophia married to both men and inherited both fortunes in the event of their death was too monstrous a coincidence to be considered natural. For that reason, I had concluded before I left the Galsworthy residence that you, Lady Sophia, had murdered both your husbands.

  “But Theodore Wargrave had committed suicide. It was inconceivable that the wound to the head could have been forcibly administered without a struggle taking place, and yet there had been no evidence of such a struggle. It is not easy to put a gun to a man’s head and shoot unless that man is unprepared or somehow restrained. But there had been no suggestion that Wargrave had been restrained prior to his death and there was no evidence of any attempt by Wargrave to defend himself. The suicide verdict had been accepted as the truth and the matter had been closed. My task, as I saw it, was to determine how you had managed to commit murder and make it appear so convincingly as suicide.

  “A sensible place to start was the original police report into the investigation. I confess that I was disheartened when I found nothing to provide me with a clue. But Watson, here, summarized the medical examiner’s report, and it was there that the first glimmer of light came into my increasing darkness. Watson, do you recall the contents of that summary of yours?”

  I nodded. “Liver damage from alcohol excess, signs of tooth decay, below average weight, if I recall correctly.”

  Holmes went to the window and drew aside one of the curtains. “In the street below, you will find hundreds of men with similar afflictions. The London streets teem with people suffering from a lack of food, a dependence on drink, and similar horrors. But Theodore Wargrave was a wealthy man, the owner of a successful business which he had sold for a small fortune. Indeed, had not his wife inherited that very same fortune when Wargrave had taken his own life? Why should a man of the higher class of society suffer from the same ailments of a man from the very lowest rung of that same ladder?”

  Lady Sophia had regained her composure. “You seem to find some difficulty in making your point, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Must we listen to this discourse on medical reports and society’s troubles?”

  Holmes slammed his stick against the wooden floor. “You must, madam! For it goes to the very heart of the matter. There was no reason why such a man as Wargrave would have been without food and no reason why he would have displayed those medical conditions more in tune with a life of poverty and deprivation. Therefore, I concluded that the body which had been found with a bullet hole in its temple was not Theodore Wargrave, but that of a man whose name we shall never know, who had fallen into the depths of misery and despair.”

  “But I identified the body as that of my husband,” said the lady.

  “And that could only mean that you were involved in the crime,” I replied.

  “Precisely, Watson. It was not your husband whose body you identified; instead, it was the body of some homeless vagrant whom you had enticed into your grasp. With what bait? The promise of food and warmth, no doubt, and the presentation of a suit of clothes of your husband’s which served as proof of your benevolent intentions. Then, whilst he was admiring himself in his new attire, the real Theodore Wargrave came up from behind, put a gun to the unsuspecting man’s temple and pulled the trigger before he could either react or acknowledge what was taking place.

  “As for Theodore Wargrave, he vanished. All that was required was for his wife to discharge a suitable period of mourning, inherit the money, and move on with her life. The fear had always been that one fortune would be insufficient to slake your thirst for wealth, and so it proved. It occurred to you both that if Mrs. Wargrave here could marry again, and marry a man of equal or better wealth than Wargrave, then Mr. Wargrave could return from the dead and murder the new husband without any fear of suspicion being aroused. After all, death is the greatest of all alibis. Then, Lady Sophia would inherit the second estate and no doubt move abroad to distance herself from her grief.”

  I was beginning to see some light. “And then the apparently dead Mr. Wargrave would join her under an assumed name, and they would marry once more.”

  Holmes gave an assured nod of his head. “An ingenious plan, I must admit. Unfortunately for you both, a man whom neither of you had ever noticed during his employment at the Wargrave Publishing Company thought he had seen Theodore Wargrave only this very morning, no doubt retuning from the murder of Sir Benjamin Galsworthy. I had concluded almost immediately that Harry Collins had been misguided and I became convinced of it when I began to suspect Lady Sophia of the murder of both Wargrave and Galsworthy. Collins had not known your first husband well and he was elderly, so it was entirely possible that he had been mistaken. And yet, he had believed it absolutely. Only when I read the post-mortem report on Wargrave did I begin to suspect the truth.”

  Chappell stepped to one side, distancing himself from the woman who stood by his side. “I have no business here. You talk of murder, people I have never heard of, and of things I know nothing about. I took these rooms because they are all I can afford and that is all there is to it. Be gone and leave me in peace.”

  Lady Sophia glared at Chappell with the eyes of a woman who sees the wolf discard the fleece of its disguise. “You devil! Do you not see that the telegram condemns us both?”

  Sherlock Holmes spoke with the calm, controlled manner which showed that he was master of the situation. “She is quite right, sir. There must be a connection between you or else the telegram would not have brought her here. Not just to this house, but to this very room, mark you.”

  “And you know the connection, of course,” said Lady Sophia.

  “I think it is clear to us all, my lady. This man, Chappell, is Theodore Wargrave. Collins was not mistaken. He had seen Theodore Wargrave, but it was not a case of resurrection or a miraculous return from the dead, for Theodore Wargrave had not died. In his place, a common man whose life was thought by both of you to be expendable had been sacrificed so that you could murder a richer but no less innocent man for his money.”

  Theodore Wargrave, since no longer could he be called Chappell, walked to the small wooden chair in the corner of the room and sat down.

  “I doubted we could pull it off a second time,” said he, his head in his hands. “But the allure of money has always been strong for both of us. When you come from nothing, Mr. Holmes, the desire to have everything swells within you. It never leaves you. I had built up that business honestly and I had made something of it. But it had been hard work and I knew I could never again go through the sacrifices and the toil required to build a new company, not at the age I had reached. But, still, I had this passionate lust for money. We both had, had we not, Sophia?”

  The lady took his hu
ge hand in hers and kissed it. “We knew that it would have to be the last time. We were fearful of the very coincidence which you had identified, Mr. Holmes, but we felt that the death of Theodore would be sufficient protection.”

  “It may have been, Lady Sophia,” said Holmes. “Women have lost both husbands before, even to violence. In this case, the additional coincidence of the wife finding the body was too much to be credited. In the case of Wargrave, it was necessary for you to find the body because you had to identify it. But, with the Galsworthy murder, anybody in the house could have discovered the crime and my suspicions would not have been aroused. Indeed, it would have been better for you had someone else discovered the body, but like many criminals before you, you overplayed your part.”

  “And the supposed burglary?” I said.

  “It was my idea,” said Wargrave. “I thought it best to suggest that the killer came from the outside, from the millions in this city. That would mean that the police would search amongst the masses rather than within the closed household. But never once would they think to look for a man who was dead.”

  Holmes nodded. “And if it had not been for the bad luck of Collins seeing you, they might still be looking amongst those millions.”

  “I had no idea I had been recognised,” said Wargrave. “Even if I had looked him in the eye, I would never have known him.”

  “No, your nature shows that much is evident, sir,” said Holmes. He began to pace the room, his eyes darting from the floor to his prey. “Of the murderers I have confronted in my career, you pair are amongst the worst. Your indiscriminate disregard for human life in all its variety disgusts me beyond your greed.”